'Fault Lines'

In the Weekly Standard, Noemie Emery has produced an article so excellent and full of insight that it seems wrong to even try and excerpt. I urge you to read every word about Obama's apologists and how they keep trying to scapegoat the opposition.

Consider this morsel a tiny free sample and then run over there to read the whole thing:

This sanity index also tracks the racism quotient, and both are tied to Obama's poll ratings: When they are up in the 60s, the country is sane and postracial; in the 50s, it becomes borderline; in the 40s, the country is both xenophobic and stark, raving mad. Could Obama himself have done anything to contribute to this outbreak of unreason? Perish the thought. All he did was push a left-wing agenda on a center-right country, wage wars on the Tea Party, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Chief Justice John Roberts, mock his opponents and malign them as racists, blow through the six thousand warning signs that health care was politically toxic, blast his way through legal roadblocks set up in the Senate by means people saw as abuses of power, and celebrate later with gloating and song. In their new book Mad as Hell, about the life and times of the Tea Party movement, pollsters Doug Schoen and Scott Rasmussen say that the feeling of being deliberately ignored and dismissed by the people in power is what fuels that movement.

In fact, the movement's response to this assault on its character has been remarkably measured. Its members have expressed themselves calmly, in speech and writing. They assembled peaceably for redress of grievances. They backed candidates, campaigned for them, and accepted defeat with good grace when their members were beaten: It was the establishment "moderates" who behaved like bad sports. The charges of racism against them appear to be specious and planted by Democrats, and the rare instances of violence that have occurred in their ambit were visited on them by the president's backers. Meanwhile, the president has behaved as if he lived in an alternative universe, blocking out all available evidence that the entire country is not like Hyde Park.

The Tea Party is about to deliver a blow that, if Obama is rational, ought to rock his foundations. We'll see then who is in touch with the real world.

Clarice Feldman

In the Weekly Standard, Noemie Emery has produced an article so excellent and full of insight that it seems wrong to even try and excerpt. I urge you to read every word about Obama's apologists and how they keep trying to scapegoat the opposition.

Consider this morsel a tiny free sample and then run over there to read the whole thing:

This sanity index also tracks the racism quotient, and both are tied to Obama's poll ratings: When they are up in the 60s, the country is sane and postracial; in the 50s, it becomes borderline; in the 40s, the country is both xenophobic and stark, raving mad. Could Obama himself have done anything to contribute to this outbreak of unreason? Perish the thought. All he did was push a left-wing agenda on a center-right country, wage wars on the Tea Party, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Chief Justice John Roberts, mock his opponents and malign them as racists, blow through the six thousand warning signs that health care was politically toxic, blast his way through legal roadblocks set up in the Senate by means people saw as abuses of power, and celebrate later with gloating and song. In their new book Mad as Hell, about the life and times of the Tea Party movement, pollsters Doug Schoen and Scott Rasmussen say that the feeling of being deliberately ignored and dismissed by the people in power is what fuels that movement.

In fact, the movement's response to this assault on its character has been remarkably measured. Its members have expressed themselves calmly, in speech and writing. They assembled peaceably for redress of grievances. They backed candidates, campaigned for them, and accepted defeat with good grace when their members were beaten: It was the establishment "moderates" who behaved like bad sports. The charges of racism against them appear to be specious and planted by Democrats, and the rare instances of violence that have occurred in their ambit were visited on them by the president's backers. Meanwhile, the president has behaved as if he lived in an alternative universe, blocking out all available evidence that the entire country is not like Hyde Park.

The Tea Party is about to deliver a blow that, if Obama is rational, ought to rock his foundations. We'll see then who is in touch with the real world.